Quote Originally Posted by Na6 View Post
"When it comes to UI, the bitmap images are used for both icons and text that are loaded by memory, but the number of elements to display a single item are far less when using an icon than using a string of text. "

Is each letter in a text its own bitmap image or something?
If you are really interested in the explanation: Bitmaps (or other such images) can be stored as a pixel array or as a vector of vectors (same thing when compiled). Because of this, there is a fixed size and number of bits used for each pixel in the bitmap. Each pixel can be expressed in a compressed version and uncompressed at compile time. Strings have a variable number of character, which each take the space of 8 bits. Because they are also not fixed size, they must be expressed in a dynamic structure (an object) before they can be used. The overhead for the classes and any polymorphism is very large. As was said before, a programmer would have easily understood why this statement was said. But not everyone here (even though they think they are) are programmers.